Mississippi River Trail Ride

Ebb and Flow

A ride down the Mississippi River to his high-school reunion helps a cyclist appreciate the hometown he once despised.

frank bures

The trail wound up around the back of the hill, through woods, then finally up an old concrete staircase, where it emerged into a meadow the length of the hill. Below, the valley opened in its giant yawn.

It was green and blue as far as I could see. The river fanned out for a mile before rising up on the other side. Sun shone off the water. Some birds with wide wingspans drifted overhead.

Much here was different from when Thoreau sat writing letters. Yet, the hill was the same. The valley was the same. And the river was still massive, still flowing to the sea. I had one of those brief moments when a place we know so well suddenly seems like an exotic, beautiful, lost world we are seeing for the first time. Maybe that's what the mysterious point of my trip home was all about.

I got on my bike and rode over mile-long hills, through hidden valleys, past the shell of a once-luxurious hotel where Ulysses Grant and Millard Fillmore and William Randolph Hearst had stayed. I almost rode over a snake sunning itself on the road. I came to a place called Wabasha, where I found myself at the National Eagle Center, a giant gift shop masquerading as an educational facility about birds.

That was where I ran into a kid with a bright yellow Bike Across America shirt, and stopped to talk to him. It turned out he was in the crew, not riding. The cyclists, he said, are "mostly retired people," headed from west to east.

They weren't alone. The roads, it seemed, were full of people biking across America. But almost none were going the way I was, north to south. I'd seen only a few other cyclists ride the Mississippi River Trail for any length of time.

That night, when I got to my campground, I asked at the desk if they got many cyclists riding the river.

"Yeah, we do!" the man checking me in said.

"Mostly from Europe, though. I think we're on some map that says this a good place for bikers."

The next day, I continued south, across a large plain I'd never seen, to a town I'd never heard of, where I sat and watched a deer slip into the river and swim across a channel. I rode through some ancient sand dunes that must have resembled what this area was before it turned into farmland. I watched a mink cross the road in front of me. I was having such a good time exploring, discovering just how little I knew about the valley where I grew up, that I almost forgot where I was going--until a small voice reminded me.

"Get out of here, you ugly weirdo!" a kid yelled from his porch. He stood next to his parents, who looked at me coldly. I waved, then sped away as a grossly overweight basset hound ran out and tried to bite my ankle off.

I was very close to home now.

For 20 years, I'd been trying to be not from here. I hated my hometown's inwardness, its death grip on the things that mattered least, and for two decades I'd tried to expunge the part of me born here and replace it with pieces from everywhere else.